Page:The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Volume 02.djvu/32

14 in a small way; but it is the very maddest vagary of chance that out of all the millions of early Egyptians he should be the one to have his little boast of success survive until now, and now through Egyptologists be preserved perchance until the end of time. So Methen's boastful record of his life, faded now and difficult to read, obscure of wording and interpretation, is given here as Egypt's earliest surviving life-scene.

Then comes the Palermo stone. This begins for us Egyptian history, as Methen begins biography. The Palermo stone is a broken fragment from a large tablet, which must have been set up somewhere as a sort of permanent historical record during the Fifth Egyptian Dynasty (2750 B.C.). The original stone contained a list of all the preceding kings, arranged in chronological order and with brief notes of the chief events of each reign, sometimes of each year of each reign. The remaining fragment is unreadable in part and gives us only vague visions of large events, whose details the imagination must fill out as best it may.

Of Egypt before the close of the Fifth Dynasty we possess only such records as these, shadowy hints of life, pictures fascinating to pore over and meditate upon with their wistful evidence that human hearts yearned then for much the same things that they yearn for now: mothers schemed for their sons; men prided themselves on building finer houses than their neighbors; foreign regions were harried and their people "hacked" and plundered without remorse; and then the conquerors returned in pleasant pride to dream amid their "vines" and "fig-trees."